Twelve Stories and a Dream, by H. G. Wells

Filmer

In truth the mastery of flying was the work of thousands of men — this man a suggestion and that an experiment,
until at last only one vigorous intellectual effort was needed to finish the work. But the inexorable injustice of the
popular mind has decided that of all these thousands, one man, and that a man who never flew, should be chosen as the
discoverer, just as it has chosen to honour Watt as the discoverer of steam and Stephenson of the steam-engine. And
surely of all honoured names none is so grotesquely and tragically honoured as poor Filmer’s, the timid, intellectual
creature who solved the problem over which the world had hung perplexed and a little fearful for so many generations,
the man who pressed the button that has changed peace and warfare and well-nigh every condition of human life and
happiness. Never has that recurring wonder of the littleness of the scientific man in the face of the greatness of his
science found such an amazing exemplification. Much concerning Filmer is, and must remain, profoundly obscure — Filmers
attract no Boswells — but the essential facts and the concluding scene are clear enough, and there are letters, and
notes, and casual allusions to piece the whole together. And this is the story one makes, putting this thing with that,
of Filmer’s life and death.

The first authentic trace of Filmer on the page of history is a document in which he applies for admission as a paid
student in physics to the Government laboratories at South Kensington, and therein he describes himself as the son of a
“military bootmaker” (“cobbler” in the vulgar tongue) of Dover, and lists his various examination proofs of a high
proficiency in chemistry and mathematics. With a certain want of dignity he seeks to enhance these attainments by a
profession of poverty and disadvantages, and he writes of the laboratory as the “gaol” of his ambitions, a slip which
reinforces his claim to have devoted himself exclusively to the exact sciences. The document is endorsed in a manner
that shows Filmer was admitted to this coveted opportunity; but until quite recently no traces of his success in the
Government institution could be found.

It has now, however, been shown that in spite of his professed zeal for research, Filmer, before he had held this
scholarship a year, was tempted, by the possibility of a small increase in his immediate income, to abandon it in order
to become one of the nine-pence-an-hour computers employed by a well-known Professor in his vicarious conduct of those
extensive researches of his in solar physics — researches which are still a matter of perplexity to astronomers.
Afterwards, for the space of seven years, save for the pass lists of the London University, in which he is seen to
climb slowly to a double first class B.Sc., in mathematics and chemistry, there is no evidence of how Filmer passed his
life. No one knows how or where he lived, though it seems highly probable that he continued to support himself by
teaching while he prosecuted the studies necessary for this distinction. And then, oddly enough, one finds him
mentioned in the correspondence of Arthur Hicks, the poet.

“You remember Filmer,” Hicks writes to his friend Vance; “well, HE hasn’t altered a bit, the same hostile mumble and
the nasty chin — how CAN a man contrive to be always three days from shaving? — and a sort of furtive air of being
engaged in sneaking in front of one; even his coat and that frayed collar of his show no further signs of the passing
years. He was writing in the library and I sat down beside him in the name of God’s charity, whereupon he deliberately
insulted me by covering up his memoranda. It seems he has some brilliant research on hand that he suspects me of all
people — with a Bodley Booklet a-printing! — of stealing. He has taken remarkable honours at the University — he went
through them with a sort of hasty slobber, as though he feared I might interrupt him before he had told me all — and he
spoke of taking his D.Sc. as one might speak of taking a cab. And he asked what I was doing — with a sort of
comparative accent, and his arm was spread nervously, positively a protecting arm, over the paper that hid the precious
idea — his one hopeful idea.

“‘Poetry,’ he said, ‘Poetry. And what do you profess to teach in it, Hicks?’

“The thing’s a Provincial professorling in the very act of budding, and I thank the Lord devoutly that but for the
precious gift of indolence I also might have gone this way to D.Sc. and destruction . . .”

A curious little vignette that I am inclined to think caught Filmer in or near the very birth of his discovery.
Hicks was wrong in anticipating a provincial professorship for Filmer. Our next glimpse of him is lecturing on “rubber
and rubber substitutes,” to the Society of Arts — he had become manager to a great plastic-substance manufactory — and
at that time, it is now known, he was a member of the Aeronautical Society, albeit he contributed nothing to the
discussions of that body, preferring no doubt to mature his great conception without external assistance. And within
two years of that paper before the Society of Arts he was hastily taking out a number of patents and proclaiming in
various undignified ways the completion of the divergent inquiries which made his flying machine possible. The first
definite statement to that effect appeared in a halfpenny evening paper through the agency of a man who lodged in the
same house with Filmer. His final haste after his long laborious secret patience seems to have been due to a needless
panic, Bootle, the notorious American scientific quack, having made an announcement that Filmer interpreted wrongly as
an anticipation of his idea.

Now what precisely was Filmer’s idea? Really a very simple one. Before his time the pursuit of aeronautics had taken
two divergent lines, and had developed on the one hand balloons — large apparatus lighter than air, easy in ascent, and
comparatively safe in descent, but floating helplessly before any breeze that took them; and on the other, flying
machines that flew only in theory — vast flat structures heavier than air, propelled and kept up by heavy engines and
for the most part smashing at the first descent. But, neglecting the fact that the inevitable final collapse rendered
them impossible, the weight of the flying machines gave them this theoretical advantage, that they could go through the
air against a wind, a necessary condition if aerial navigation was to have any practical value. It is Filmer’s
particular merit that he perceived the way in which the contrasted and hitherto incompatible merits of balloon and
heavy flying machine might be combined in one apparatus, which should be at choice either heavier or lighter than air.
He took hints from the contractile bladders of fish and the pneumatic cavities of birds. He devised an arrangement of
contractile and absolutely closed balloons which when expanded could lift the actual flying apparatus with ease, and
when retracted by the complicated “musculature” he wove about them, were withdrawn almost completely into the frame;
and he built the large framework which these balloons sustained, of hollow, rigid tubes, the air in which, by an
ingenious contrivance, was automatically pumped out as the apparatus fell, and which then remained exhausted so long as
the aeronaut desired. There were no wings or propellers to his machine, such as there had been to all previous
aeroplanes, and the only engine required was the compact and powerful little appliance needed to contract the balloons.
He perceived that such an apparatus as he had devised might rise with frame exhausted and balloons expanded to a
considerable height, might then contract its balloons and let the air into its frame, and by an adjustment of its
weights slide down the air in any desired direction. As it fell it would accumulate velocity and at the same time lose
weight, and the momentum accumulated by its down-rush could be utilised by means of a shifting of its weights to drive
it up in the air again as the balloons expanded. This conception, which is still the structural conception of all
successful flying machines, needed, however, a vast amount of toil upon its details before it could actually be
realised, and such toil Filmer — as he was accustomed to tell the numerous interviewers who crowded upon him in the
heyday of his fame — “ungrudgingly and unsparingly gave.” His particular difficulty was the elastic lining of the
contractile balloon. He found he needed a new substance, and in the discovery and manufacture of that new substance he
had, as he never failed to impress upon the interviewers, “performed a far more arduous work than even in the actual
achievement of my seemingly greater discovery.”

But it must not be imagined that these interviews followed hard upon Filmer’s proclamation of his invention. An
interval of nearly five years elapsed during which he timidly remained at his rubber factory — he seems to have been
entirely dependent on his small income from this source — making misdirected attempts to assure a quite indifferent
public that he really HAD invented what he had invented. He occupied the greater part of his leisure in the composition
of letters to the scientific and daily press, and so forth, stating precisely the net result of his contrivances, and
demanding financial aid. That alone would have sufficed for the suppression of his letters. He spent such holidays as
he could arrange in unsatisfactory interviews with the door-keepers of leading London papers — he was singularly not
adapted for inspiring hall-porters with confidence — and he positively attempted to induce the War Office to take up
his work with him. There remains a confidential letter from Major-General Volleyfire to the Earl of Frogs. “The man’s a
crank and a bounder to boot,” says the Major-General in his bluff, sensible, army way, and so left it open for the
Japanese to secure, as they subsequently did, the priority in this side of warfare — a priority they still to our great
discomfort retain.

And then by a stroke of luck the membrane Filmer had invented for his contractile balloon was discovered to be
useful for the valves of a new oil-engine, and he obtained the means for making a trial model of his invention. He
threw up his rubber factory appointment, desisted from all further writing, and, with a certain secrecy that seems to
have been an inseparable characteristic of all his proceedings, set to work upon the apparatus. He seems to have
directed the making of its parts and collected most of it in a room in Shoreditch, but its final putting together was
done at Dymchurch, in Kent. He did not make the affair large enough to carry a man, but he made an extremely ingenious
use of what were then called the Marconi rays to control its flight. The first flight of this first practicable flying
machine took place over some fields near Burford Bridge, near Hythe, in Kent, and Filmer followed and controlled its
flight upon a specially constructed motor tricycle.

The flight was, considering all things, an amazing success. The apparatus was brought in a cart from Dymchurch to
Burford Bridge, ascended there to a height of nearly three hundred feet, swooped thence very nearly back to Dymchurch,
came about in its sweep, rose again, circled, and finally sank uninjured in a field behind the Burford Bridge Inn. At
its descent a curious thing happened. Filmer got off his tricycle, scrambled over the intervening dyke, advanced
perhaps twenty yards towards his triumph, threw out his arms in a strange gesticulation, and fell down in a dead faint.
Every one could then recall the ghastliness of his features and all the evidences of extreme excitement they had
observed throughout the trial, things they might otherwise have forgotten. Afterwards in the inn he had an
unaccountable gust of hysterical weeping.

Altogether there were not twenty witnesses of this affair, and those for the most part uneducated men. The New
Romney doctor saw the ascent but not the descent, his horse being frightened by the electrical apparatus on Filmer’s
tricycle and giving him a nasty spill. Two members of the Kent constabulary watched the affair from a cart in an
unofficial spirit, and a grocer calling round the Marsh for orders and two lady cyclists seem almost to complete the
list of educated people. There were two reporters present, one representing a Folkestone paper and the other being a
fourth-class interviewer and “symposium” journalist, whose expenses down, Filmer, anxious as ever for adequate
advertisement — and now quite realising the way in which adequate advertisement may be obtained — had paid. The latter
was one of those writers who can throw a convincing air of unreality over the most credible events, and his
half-facetious account of the affair appeared in the magazine page of a popular journal. But, happily for Filmer, this
person’s colloquial methods were more convincing. He went to offer some further screed upon the subject to Banghurst,
the proprietor of the New Paper, and one of the ablest and most unscrupulous men in London journalism, and Banghurst
instantly seized upon the situation. The interviewer vanishes from the narrative, no doubt very doubtfully remunerated,
and Banghurst, Banghurst himself, double chin, grey twill suit, abdomen, voice, gestures and all, appears at Dymchurch,
following his large, unrivalled journalistic nose. He had seen the whole thing at a glance, just what it was and what
it might be.

At his touch, as it were, Filmer’s long-pent investigations exploded into fame. He instantly and most magnificently
was a Boom. One turns over the files of the journals of the year 1907 with a quite incredulous recognition of how swift
and flaming the boom of those days could be. The July papers know nothing of flying, see nothing in flying, state by a
most effective silence that men never would, could or should fly. In August flying and Filmer and flying and parachutes
and aerial tactics and the Japanese Government and Filmer and again flying, shouldered the war in Yunnan and the gold
mines of Upper Greenland off the leading page. And Banghurst had given ten thousand pounds, and, further, Banghurst was
giving five thousand pounds, and Banghurst had devoted his well-known, magnificent (but hitherto sterile) private
laboratories and several acres of land near his private residence on the Surrey hills to the strenuous and violent
completion — Banghurst fashion — of the life-size practicable flying machine. Meanwhile, in the sight of privileged
multitudes in the walled-garden of the Banghurst town residence in Fulham, Filmer was exhibited at weekly garden
parties putting the working model through its paces. At enormous initial cost, but with a final profit, the New Paper
presented its readers with a beautiful photographic souvenir of the first of these occasions.

Here again the correspondence of Arthur Hicks and his friend Vance comes to our aid.

“I saw Filmer in his glory,” he writes, with just the touch of envy natural to his position as a poet passe. “The
man is brushed and shaved, dressed in the fashion of a Royal-Institution-Afternoon Lecturer, the very newest shape in
frock-coats and long patent shoes, and altogether in a state of extraordinary streakiness between an owlish great man
and a scared abashed self-conscious bounder cruelly exposed. He hasn’t a touch of colour in the skin of his face, his
head juts forward, and those queer little dark amber eyes of his watch furtively round him for his fame. His clothes
fit perfectly and yet sit upon him as though he had bought them ready-made. He speaks in a mumble still, but he says,
you perceive indistinctly, enormous self-assertive things, he backs into the rear of groups by instinct if Banghurst
drops the line for a minute, and when he walks across Banghurst’s lawn one perceives him a little out of breath and
going jerky, and that his weak white hands are clenched. His is a state of tension — horrible tension. And he is the
Greatest Discoverer of This or Any Age — the Greatest Discoverer of This or Any Age! What strikes one so forcibly about
him is that he didn’t somehow quite expect it ever, at any rate, not at all like this. Banghurst is about everywhere,
the energetic M.C. of his great little catch, and I swear he will have every one down on his lawn there before he has
finished with the engine; he had bagged the prime minister yesterday, and he, bless his heart! didn’t look particularly
outsize, on the very first occasion. Conceive it! Filmer! Our obscure unwashed Filmer, the Glory of British science!
Duchesses crowd upon him, beautiful, bold peeresses say in their beautiful, clear loud voices — have you noticed how
penetrating the great lady is becoming nowadays? — ‘Oh, Mr. Filmer, how DID you do it?’

“Common men on the edge of things are too remote for the answer. One imagines something in the way of that
interview, ‘toil ungrudgingly and unsparingly given, Madam, and, perhaps — I don’t know — but perhaps a little special
aptitude.’”

So far Hicks, and the photographic supplement to the New Paper is in sufficient harmony with the description. In one
picture the machine swings down towards the river, and the tower of Fulham church appears below it through a gap in the
elms, and in another, Filmer sits at his guiding batteries, and the great and beautiful of the earth stand around him,
with Banghurst massed modestly but resolutely in the rear. The grouping is oddly apposite. Occluding much of Banghurst,
and looking with a pensive, speculative expression at Filmer, stands the Lady Mary Elkinghorn, still beautiful, in
spite of the breath of scandal and her eight-and-thirty years, the only person whose face does not admit a perception
of the camera that was in the act of snapping them all.

So much for the exterior facts of the story, but, after all, they are very exterior facts. About the real interest
of the business one is necessarily very much in the dark. How was Filmer feeling at the time? How much was a certain
unpleasant anticipation present inside that very new and fashionable frock-coat? He was in the halfpenny, penny,
six-penny, and more expensive papers alike, and acknowledged by the whole world as “the Greatest Discoverer of This or
Any Age.” He had invented a practicable flying machine, and every day down among the Surrey hills the life-sized model
was getting ready. And when it was ready, it followed as a clear inevitable consequence of his having invented and made
it — everybody in the world, indeed, seemed to take it for granted; there wasn’t a gap anywhere in that serried front
of anticipation — that he would proudly and cheerfully get aboard it, ascend with it, and fly.

But we know now pretty clearly that simple pride and cheerfulness in such an act were singularly out of harmony with
Filmer’s private constitution. It occurred to no one at the time, but there the fact is. We can guess with some
confidence now that it must have been drifting about in his mind a great deal during the day, and, from a little note
to his physician complaining of persistent insomnia, we have the soundest reason for supposing it dominated his nights,
— the idea that it would be after all, in spite of his theoretical security, an abominably sickening, uncomfortable,
and dangerous thing for him to flap about in nothingness a thousand feet or so in the air. It must have dawned upon him
quite early in the period of being the Greatest Discoverer of This or Any Age, the vision of doing this and that with
an extensive void below. Perhaps somewhen in his youth he had looked down a great height or fallen down in some
excessively uncomfortable way; perhaps some habit of sleeping on the wrong side had resulted in that disagreeable
falling nightmare one knows, and given him his horror; of the strength of that horror there remains now not a particle
of doubt.

Apparently he had never weighed this duty of flying in his earlier days of research; the machine had been his end,
but now things were opening out beyond his end, and particularly this giddy whirl up above there. He was a Discoverer
and he had Discovered. But he was not a Flying Man, and it was only now that he was beginning to perceive clearly that
he was expected to fly. Yet, however much the thing was present in his mind he gave no expression to it until the very
end, and meanwhile he went to and fro from Banghurst’s magnificent laboratories, and was interviewed and lionised, and
wore good clothes, and ate good food, and lived in an elegant flat, enjoying a very abundant feast of such good,
coarse, wholesome Fame and Success as a man, starved for all his years as he had been starved, might be reasonably
expected to enjoy.

After a time, the weekly gatherings in Fulham ceased. The model had failed one day just for a moment to respond to
Filmer’s guidance, or he had been distracted by the compliments of an archbishop. At any rate, it suddenly dug its nose
into the air just a little too steeply as the archbishop was sailing through a Latin quotation for all the world like
an archbishop in a book, and it came down in the Fulham Road within three yards of a ‘bus horse. It stood for a second
perhaps, astonishing and in its attitude astonished, then it crumpled, shivered into pieces, and the ‘bus horse was
incidentally killed.

Filmer lost the end of the archiepiscopal compliment. He stood up and stared as his invention swooped out of sight
and reach of him. His long, white hands still gripped his useless apparatus. The archbishop followed his skyward stare
with an apprehension unbecoming in an archbishop.

Then came the crash and the shouts and uproar from the road to relieve Filmer’s tension. “My God!” he whispered, and
sat down.

Every one else almost was staring to see where the machine had vanished, or rushing into the house.

The making of the big machine progressed all the more rapidly for this. Over its making presided Filmer, always a
little slow and very careful in his manner, always with a growing preoccupation in his mind. His care over the strength
and soundness of the apparatus was prodigious. The slightest doubt, and he delayed everything until the doubtful part
could be replaced. Wilkinson, his senior assistant, fumed at some of these delays, which, he insisted, were for the
most part unnecessary. Banghurst magnified the patient certitude of Filmer in the New Paper, and reviled it bitterly to
his wife, and MacAndrew, the second assistant, approved Filmer’s wisdom. “We’re not wanting a fiasco, man,” said
MacAndrew. “He’s perfectly well advised.”

And whenever an opportunity arose Filmer would expound to Wilkinson and MacAndrew just exactly how every part of the
flying machine was to be controlled and worked, so that in effect they would be just as capable, and even more capable,
when at last the time came, of guiding it through the skies.

Now I should imagine that if Filmer had seen fit at this stage to define just what he was feeling, and to take a
definite line in the matter of his ascent, he might have escaped that painful ordeal quite easily. If he had had it
clearly in his mind he could have done endless things. He would surely have found no difficulty with a specialist to
demonstrate a weak heart, or something gastric or pulmonary, to stand in his way — that is the line I am astonished he
did not take, — or he might, had he been man enough, have declared simply and finally that he did not intend to do the
thing. But the fact is, though the dread was hugely present in his mind, the thing was by no means sharp and clear. I
fancy that all through this period he kept telling himself that when the occasion came he would find himself equal to
it. He was like a man just gripped by a great illness, who says he feels a little out of sorts, and expects to be
better presently. Meanwhile he delayed the completion of the machine, and let the assumption that he was going to fly
it take root and flourish exceedingly about him. He even accepted anticipatory compliments on his courage. And, barring
this secret squeamishness, there can be no doubt he found all the praise and distinction and fuss he got a delightful
and even intoxicating draught.

The Lady Mary Elkinghorn made things a little more complicated for him.

How THAT began was a subject of inexhaustible speculation to Hicks. Probably in the beginning she was just a little
“nice” to him with that impartial partiality of hers, and it may be that to her eyes, standing out conspicuously as he
did ruling his monster in the upper air, he had a distinction that Hicks was not disposed to find. And somehow they
must have had a moment of sufficient isolation, and the great Discoverer a moment of sufficient courage for something
just a little personal to be mumbled or blurted. However it began, there is no doubt that it did begin, and presently
became quite perceptible to a world accustomed to find in the proceedings of the Lady Mary Elkinghorn a matter of
entertainment. It complicated things, because the state of love in such a virgin mind as Filmer’s would brace his
resolution, if not sufficiently, at any rate considerably towards facing a danger he feared, and hampered him in such
attempts at evasion as would otherwise be natural and congenial.

It remains a matter for speculation just how the Lady Mary felt for Filmer and just what she thought of him. At
thirty-eight one may have gathered much wisdom and still be not altogether wise, and the imagination still functions
actively enough in creating glamours and effecting the impossible. He came before her eyes as a very central man, and
that always counts, and he had powers, unique powers as it seemed, at any rate in the air. The performance with the
model had just a touch of the quality of a potent incantation, and women have ever displayed an unreasonable
disposition to imagine that when a man has powers he must necessarily have Power. Given so much, and what was not good
in Filmer’s manner and appearance became an added merit. He was modest, he hated display, but given an occasion where
TRUE qualities are needed, then — then one would see!

The late Mrs. Bampton thought it wise to convey to Lady Mary her opinion that Filmer, all things considered, was
rather a “grub.” “He’s certainly not a sort of man I have ever met before,” said the Lady Mary, with a quite unruffled
serenity. And Mrs. Bampton, after a swift, imperceptible glance at that serenity, decided that so far as saying
anything to Lady Mary went, she had done as much as could be expected of her. But she said a great deal to other
people.

And at last, without any undue haste or unseemliness, the day dawned, the great day, when Banghurst had promised his
public — the world in fact — that flying should be finally attained and overcome. Filmer saw it dawn, watched even in
the darkness before it dawned, watched its stars fade and the grey and pearly pinks give place at last to the clear
blue sky of a sunny, cloudless day. He watched it from the window of his bedroom in the new-built wing of Banghurst’s
Tudor house. And as the stars were overwhelmed and the shapes and substances of things grew into being out of the
amorphous dark, he must have seen more and more distinctly the festive preparations beyond the beech clumps near the
green pavilion in the outer park, the three stands for the privileged spectators, the raw, new fencing of the
enclosure, the sheds and workshops, the Venetian masts and fluttering flags that Banghurst had considered essential,
black and limp in the breezeless dawn, and amidst all these things a great shape covered with tarpauling. A strange and
terrible portent for humanity was that shape, a beginning that must surely spread and widen and change and dominate all
the affairs of men, but to Filmer it is very doubtful whether it appeared in anything but a narrow and personal light.
Several people heard him pacing in the small hours — for the vast place was packed with guests by a proprietor editor
who, before all understood compression. And about five o’clock, if not before, Filmer left his room and wandered out of
the sleeping house into the park, alive by that time with sunlight and birds and squirrels and the fallow deer.
MacAndrew, who was also an early riser, met him near the machine, and they went and had a look at it together.

It is doubtful if Filmer took any breakfast, in spite of the urgency of Banghurst. So soon as the guests began to be
about in some number he seems to have retreated to his room. Thence about ten he went into the shrubbery, very probably
because he had seen the Lady Mary Elkinghorn there. She was walking up and down, engaged in conversation with her old
school friend, Mrs. Brewis-Craven, and although Filmer had never met the latter lady before, he joined them and walked
beside them for some time. There were several silences in spite of the Lady Mary’s brilliance. The situation was a
difficult one, and Mrs. Brewis-Craven did not master its difficulty. “He struck me,” she said afterwards with a
luminous self-contradiction, “as a very unhappy person who had something to say, and wanted before all things to be
helped to say it. But how was one to help him when one didn’t know what it was?”

At half-past eleven the enclosures for the public in the outer park were crammed, there was an intermittent stream
of equipages along the belt which circles the outer park, and the house party was dotted over the lawn and shrubbery
and the corner of the inner park, in a series of brilliantly attired knots, all making for the flying machine. Filmer
walked in a group of three with Banghurst, who was supremely and conspicuously happy, and Sir Theodore Hickle, the
president of the Aeronautical Society. Mrs. Banghurst was close behind with the Lady Mary Elkinghorn, Georgina Hickle,
and the Dean of Stays. Banghurst was large and copious in speech, and such interstices as he left were filled in by
Hickle with complimentary remarks to Filmer. And Filmer walked between them saying not a word except by way of
unavoidable reply. Behind, Mrs. Banghurst listened to the admirably suitable and shapely conversation of the Dean with
that fluttered attention to the ampler clergy ten years of social ascent and ascendency had not cured in her; and the
Lady Mary watched, no doubt with an entire confidence in the world’s disillusionment, the drooping shoulders of the
sort of man she had never met before.

There was some cheering as the central party came into view of the enclosures, but it was not very unanimous nor
invigorating cheering. They were within fifty yards of the apparatus when Filmer took a hasty glance over his shoulder
to measure the distance of the ladies behind them, and decided to make the first remark he had initiated since the
house had been left. His voice was just a little hoarse, and he cut in on Banghurst in mid-sentence on Progress.

“I say, Banghurst,” he said, and stopped.

“Yes,” said Banghurst.

“I wish — ” He moistened his lips. “I’m not feeling well.”

Banghurst stopped dead. “Eh?” he shouted.

“A queer feeling.” Filmer made to move on, but Banghurst was immovable. “I don’t know. I may be better in a minute.
If not — perhaps . . . MacAndrew — ”

“You’re not feeling WELL?” said Banghurst, and stared at his white face.

“My dear!” he said, as Mrs. Banghurst came up with them, “Filmer says he isn’t feeling WELL.”

“In any case,” said Banghurst, “the ascent must be made. Perhaps if you were to sit down somewhere for a moment —
”

“It’s the crowd, I think,” said Filmer.

There was a second pause. Banghurst’s eye rested in scrutiny on Filmer, and then swept the sample of public in the
enclosure.

“It’s unfortunate,” said Sir Theodore Hickle; but still — I suppose — Your assistants — Of course, if you feel out
of condition and disinclined — ”

“I don’t think Mr. Filmer would permit THAT for a moment,” said Lady Mary.

“But if Mr. Filmer’s nerve is run — It might even be dangerous for him to attempt — ” Hickle coughed.

“It’s just because it’s dangerous,” began the Lady Mary, and felt she had made her point of view and Filmer’s plain
enough.

Conflicting motives struggled for Filmer.

“I feel I ought to go up,” he said, regarding the ground. He looked up and met the Lady Mary’s eyes. “I want to go
up,” he said, and smiled whitely at her. He turned towards Banghurst. “If I could just sit down somewhere for a moment
out of the crowd and sun — ”

Banghurst, at least, was beginning to understand the case. “Come into my little room in the green pavilion,” he
said. “It’s quite cool there.” He took Filmer by the arm.

Filmer turned his face to the Lady Mary Elkinghorn again. “I shall be all right in five minutes,” he said. “I’m
tremendously sorry — ”

The Lady Mary Elkinghorn smiled at him. “I couldn’t think — ” he said to Hickle, and obeyed the compulsion of
Banghurst’s pull.

The rest remained watching the two recede.

“He is so fragile,” said the Lady Mary.

“He’s certainly a highly nervous type,” said the Dean, whose weakness it was to regard the whole world, except
married clergymen with enormous families, as “neurotic.”

“Of course,” said Hickle, “it isn’t absolutely necessary for him to go up because he has invented — ”

“How COULD he avoid it?” asked the Lady Mary, with the faintest shadow of scorn.

“It’s certainly most unfortunate if he’s going to be ill now,” said Mrs. Banghurst a little severely.

“He’s not going to be ill,” said the Lady Mary, and certainly she had met Filmer’s eye.

“YOU’LL be all right,” said Banghurst, as they went towards the pavilion. “All you want is a nip of brandy. It ought
to be you, you know. You’ll be — you’d get it rough, you know, if you let another man — ”

“Oh, I want to go,” said Filmer. “I shall be all right. As a matter of fact I’m almost inclined NOW— . No! I think
I’ll have that nip of brandy first.”

Banghurst took him into the little room and routed out an empty decanter. He departed in search of a supply. He was
gone perhaps five minutes.

The history of those five minutes cannot be written. At intervals Filmer’s face could be seen by the people on the
easternmost of the stands erected for spectators, against the window pane peering out, and then it would recede and
fade. Banghurst vanished shouting behind the grand stand, and presently the butler appeared going pavilionward with a
tray.

The apartment in which Filmer came to his last solution was a pleasant little room very simply furnished with green
furniture and an old bureau — for Banghurst was simple in all his private ways. It was hung with little engravings
after Morland and it had a shelf of books. But as it happened, Banghurst had left a rook rifle he sometimes played with
on the top of the desk, and on the corner of the mantelshelf was a tin with three or four cartridges remaining in it.
As Filmer went up and down that room wrestling with his intolerable dilemma he went first towards the neat little rifle
athwart the blotting-pad and then towards the neat little red label

“.22 LONG.”

The thing must have jumped into his mind in a moment.

Nobody seems to have connected the report with him, though the gun, being fired in a confined space, must have
sounded loud, and there were several people in the billiard-room, separated from him only by a lath-and-plaster
partition. But directly Banghurst’s butler opened the door and smelt the sour smell of the smoke, he knew, he says,
what had happened. For the servants at least of Banghurst’s household had guessed something of what was going on in
Filmer’s mind.

All through that trying afternoon Banghurst behaved as he held a man should behave in the presence of hopeless
disaster, and his guests for the most part succeeded in not insisting upon the fact — though to conceal their
perception of it altogether was impossible — that Banghurst had been pretty elaborately and completely swindled by the
deceased. The public in the enclosure, Hicks told me, dispersed “like a party that has been ducking a welsher,” and
there wasn’t a soul in the train to London, it seems, who hadn’t known all along that flying was a quite impossible
thing for man. “But he might have tried it,” said many, “after carrying the thing so far.”

In the evening, when he was comparatively alone, Banghurst broke down and went on like a man of clay. I have been
told he wept, which must have made an imposing scene, and he certainly said Filmer had ruined his life, and offered and
sold the whole apparatus to MacAndrew for half-a-crown. “I’ve been thinking — ” said MacAndrew at the conclusion of the
bargain, and stopped.

The next morning the name of Filmer was, for the first time, less conspicuous in the New Paper than in any other
daily paper in the world. The rest of the world’s instructors, with varying emphasis, according to their dignity and
the degree of competition between themselves and the New Paper, proclaimed the “Entire Failure of the New Flying
Machine,” and “Suicide of the Impostor.” But in the district of North Surrey the reception of the news was tempered by
a perception of unusual aerial phenomena.

Overnight Wilkinson and MacAndrew had fallen into violent argument on the exact motives of their principal’s rash
act.

“The man was certainly a poor, cowardly body, but so far as his science went he was NO impostor,” said MacAndrew,
“and I’m prepared to give that proposition a very practical demonstration, Mr. Wilkinson, so soon as we’ve got the
place a little more to ourselves. For I’ve no faith in all this publicity for experimental trials.”

And to that end, while all the world was reading of the certain failure of the new flying machine, MacAndrew was
soaring and curvetting with great amplitude and dignity over the Epsom and Wimbledon divisions; and Banghurst, restored
once more to hope and energy, and regardless of public security and the Board of Trade, was pursuing his gyrations and
trying to attract his attention, on a motor car and in his pyjamas — he had caught sight of the ascent when pulling up
the blind of his bedroom window — equipped, among other things, with a film camera that was subsequently discovered to
be jammed. And Filmer was lying on the billiard table in the green pavilion with a sheet about his body.